THE FALL OF SPYDOM
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The French Disconnection

which was represented by sundry police inquiries upon our settling at Saint-Martian, uncomfortably close to France's unique nuclear missile base at St.Christol (Christoph's favorite etym) nearby, taken together with Falcone's Frenchwoman, a close friendship struck up with a fierce dog called Larzac, a Polish car with a Greek license (both unique to the mind of Vauclusian man), a penchant for continual geo-eco-socio-querying, all this and more intriguing four nations in the present case.

SEVERAL months ago a person with a name that charmed me was murdered. She was Dulcie September. She was South African. She was black. She was conspiring against the regime; no one outside South Africa dares to call that treason. I read in Le Monde,

Such is terrorism. The assassins come and go: here today, gone tomorrow. Professionals they are: courage is carefully measured: O Brave Praetorian Assassins of Dulcie September! Who next gets shot in the back of the head?

It is effective: "more bang for the buck." But it is not counter-attacked heartily. Millions of passengers are subjected to delays for search and inspection. A few thousands of security guards are added here and there. An industry of protective devices grows rapidly. Rapid effective retaliation as in the American attack on Khaddafi's Libyan Headquarters is rare. And, of course, Iran-gate showed the inconscient contradictions of USA actions; the French actions are likewise.

A simple non-violent method of bringing any nation, even the USA, to its knees, is to ban the use of the world banking system to an offender. This method, never tried, will work like a charm. Economic sanctions of practically any type are evaded, compensated for, accepted.

Financial sanctions are deadly. Denied the use of the world's banking system, the South African government, the Iranian government, the Syrian government, the Israeli government, and the whole lot of majestic sovereignties would expire in agony.

You would have instant world government. No violence. Scarcely a ruffling of the skin of commerce. No bitter fights to engage masses of public opinion on your side. Here I, who am no technocrat, recommend a technocratic panacea for terrorism. Now, display your colors, economists.

Since economic espionage is secret service and so is terrorism, how rid oneself of the first without coping with the second? The problem of military intelligence (G2) resurrects: How can you abolish espionage and thus avoid despionage and dyspionage (coming up!) when you have great armies and missile fleets and navies primed for war, and requiring a broad range of information regarding enemy information and capabilities and enemy infiltration of your own secret recesses?

The solution is simple, but part of the complex of solutions. Once into an operating, though limited, world government, the general problems of paranoia, security, armaments, and espionage find themselves under general attack and erosion. Thus, the attrition of civil secrecy finally encounters the attrition of armaments with the associated attrition of military intelligence at a point where both areas become very small and manageable.

The same is true of the vast security system related to terrorism. It will wither when terrorism becomes suicidal to its sponsors (not to the terrorists), and when the sponsors perceive better or second-best solutions to their problems.

For one example, I return to South Africa. The whites there, leading and aided by blacks and others, have achieved marvels of modern culture (while retaining senseless attitudes). You do not have to be much of a historian to realize that within a few years, the white regime will collapse or surrender under unfulfillable conditions, the whites will emigrate in a dispersed flight, and the blacks will push out the East Indians, probably seek help from the Redlands, and enter upon a lower stage of economic organization with tribal and social unrest, and with sporadic civil war. A poor prospect, yet, for the presently racist-domineered who unchain themselves, it will be a world where they draw free breath.

A better solution? Of course! A new slice of World Government wherein the world powers agree, upon the request of the finally foresightful Afrikaaners wishing to reenter their lost world, to supervise a rule of law in South Africa effectively forbidding invidious discrimination against any aggregate of the population, guaranteeing the basic human rights to all, without supporting the present distribution of property, and enabling a native economy so fair as to displace and sublimate the hostilities of the black people.

This World Government, which the South African regime despises, is the only hope for their children in the land that they have developed and enjoyed for centuries.

Sud-Afrique! If Dulcie September has died, can your December be far behind?

What does it have to do with the French connection? Free associational thinking, I admit to you: Paris -- Dulcie September -- French investigations -- South Africa -- World government -- how to gnaw away at the several angles of secret operations in the world -- and back to how the Swiss government (thence the Police) might be better spending their time and resources on the worse and larger criminals of the world, not that I am near to granting that there was anything criminal in what Herr Marx was up to.

It is quite unheard of, and so I make my suggestion small: let the Swiss government put out a little (but careful) report confirming that Swiss Airlines, Swiss banks, Swiss weapon-makers, and the South African Embassy in Bern were in no detectable way involved in the Dulcie September murder. What a fine precedent for other countries to follow! I would be glad to draw up the design and method of the study without charge, keeping the price tag for direct costs below SF 5000, some hours of bureaucratic time not included.

As in war, when a significant battle is lost -- and such was the murder of Dulcie September, then the government concerned, France, and its allies, Switzerland, Italy, et al., should ask for an immediate accounting from possibly responsible agencies, the police, the customs, the airports, the airlines, the banks, the embassies, etc., demanding to know whether any relevant aspect of the action had passed through their processes, whether they might in any way have prevented the action, whether they had any proposals for redeeming the action or preventing its recurrence.

If your police systems are inadequate for supervising this type of reaction, I can tell you how to set up a group of scientists -- political, social, economic, transportation, financial, administrative, explosive -- who will design and construct the Full-sided Terror-guard System for future use.

The ordinary responses to terrorism are unavailing. The response of the Greek authorities to last year's massacre of tourists, mostly French, on a Greek Islands ferry boat, was to put "trained commandos" on board. This can only worsen the explosive anarchy characterizing the ordinary operations of these ferry boats. And as the Greek Ta Nea paper reported, several secret services descended upon the scene.

But my FT System will escalate the secret services! Of course! I had forgotten myself for the moment. What is suggested is only temporary; ultimately the way of world government is the means of reducing the problem and thereafter the cost of coping with it.

The act of espionage is lèse-majesté. It is an act in violation of the myth of the Supreme State. And in an age when this myth is and should be breaking down, espionage breaks out everywhere. It works as a veritable plague. It responds only to the good anti-bacterium: world order by consensus and sharp penetrations into the worst problems.

For there is espionage; there is despionage; and there is dyspionage. By Maxim #21, "Espionage Leads to Despionage which Leads to Dyspionage". That is, spying and intelligence work lead to counter-espionage and counter-intelligence, and these lead by countervailing energies to the overloading, frustration, and collapse of the entire system, followed by its absorption into and transformation of the larger social system. Whence the Police State.

Spies and spy-catchers multiply reciprocally, breeding each other in ever greater profusion and confusion, until they create an environment that is destructive first of the larger normal part of intelligence work and then of most fields of knowledge themselves. The virus, so to speak, cannot discriminate as to its host.

The Rule is but a syncretistic application of Heisenberg's Indeterminacy Principle and Bronislaw Malinowski's Principle of Negative Participant Observation.

Police can hardly be expected to know these basic methodological formulations. They cannot be blamed for thinking that Heisenberg's Indeteminancy Principle is a comment on the unreliability of a famous German automobile. Or for believing that Malinowski was the former Soviet Marshal.

Malinowski, in fact, is given too much credit, for he was not acutely aware of the observational biases that are built into participant observers, such as himself among the Trobriand Islanders. He actually thought he could pass himself off as a native! It was I, I have to admit, who validated the principle by converting the positive into the negative formulation.

Five years after Malinowski's treatise on Argonauts of the Western Pacific was published (in 1922), Heisenberg came before the scientific world with the parallel doctrine in physics, namely that you cannot watch a wave and a particle at the same time. You have to change your perspective.

This has to do with watching an electron, a much speedier, smaller, and more elusive thing than Christoph Marx. The conditions that you must set up to make an accurate observation of the electron's momentum are in disagreement with the conditions needed to observe accurately the electron's position.

So the Falconian Maxim has universal application to people and particles (waves) alike, one of whose disillusioning conclusions is that as soon as you begin to watch a suspected spy, he has to behave like a non-spy and therefore you will never know except by circumstantial evidence whether he was a spy before you appeared on the scene. This is the problem of the physicist trying to watch an electron while it is behaving as such. It stops behaving as such.

This may seem to be a variation of Catch-22, but it is sufficiently distinct to be named the Filly Paradox, after my wife, who suggested it as a necessary corollary of Maxim #21.

However, if your human subject was a non-spy before you observed him, you would not know this either, having not observed him. For, paraphrasing Falconian Maxim #1, "All Non-spies act like Spies," which is the source of the Richelieu Corollary, "and can be convicted as spies."

The Filly Paradox would appear to be destructive of espionage and it is in fact operative in the great majority of cases, where espionage converts to despionage and then to dyspionage.

The few exceptions to the operation of Filly's Paradox are well known: Nathan Hale was caught red-handed (yes, America, sorry!) and hanged; Mata Hari was caught black-stockinged and hanged; etc. But most cases of purported espionage have never greeted the light because they were embarrassing fulfillments of Maxims 1 and 3, Filly's Paradox, and Richelieu's Corollary. They had long since resolved into dyspionage, and the costs and culprits of the failures and disasters were being covered in the budgets of agencies and by an extra flurry of reports from the newspaper-clippers and rumor-buyers.

The Christoph Marx case had been rapidly traversing the despionage stage and heading into the fiasco of dyspionage whence it would add its color to and disappear into the total social environment which is heading towards general dyspionage. I caught up with it and revived it in order to explain and justify my own predicament.

As it turns out, long before Marx was arrested, the French gendarmerie were calling on people in our village of Saint-Martian and asking them about Filly and me. Who are they? When did they come? What are their means of livelihood? How do they spend their time? Where are they now? When are they returning?

I might attribute this to inquiries made of the French Secret Service by the Swiss Secret Service and turned over to the unsuspicious-appearing local Municipal Police of the Town of Apt (Yep, "Anything apt to happen is apt to happen in Apt!")

Or to some independent initiative of the French secret service owing to our suspicious settlement following my long and eccentric or suspect career of being in unlikely places at likely times, such as being in this neck of the woods that is close to those missiles. At any rate, the ladies who administer the Mairie of Saint-Martian were alarmed and warned us to watch our p's and q's.

And how do you account for the sudden friendship that I have struck up with Larzac, the fiercest dog of the Luberon, who was a shepherd's pup when the poor fellow was evicted from his ancestral home on the Larzac Plateau as the French Army was trying to take over a hundred thousand hectares of land for military exercises. Every lunchtime this huge beast sticks his hairy muzzle through the bars of our kitchen window and barks or whines, depending upon his estimation of my mood, and I feed him more bones than I can afford to buy the meat for. (I have some delicious bones boiling on the stove for him at this very moment; I think it's best to cook bones for dogs, lest they get the idea that raw flesh on the hoof is their style.) I sense this obligation to the brute. And the police may sense it too.

What's more, the site of a score of poised nuclear missiles is located on the St.Christol range nearby. You are well-versed already in what the letters "chris" and "cris" do to our friend Marx. They send him into a fit of etympsychosis, and he is likely to do anything, just anything, under the influence. Now how long do you think it would take for the Swiss to make the connection with the French Deuxieme Bureau and describe the symptoms of high-grade etympschosis uncovered in the suspect?

On August 14, 1944, to show how far back my suspicious behavior in France goes, and they know it very well, for they gave me a document to attest to it, I was observed early in the morning wading ashore without visa, authorization, or license of any kind from the government whether of the National Government at Vichy or of the town of St.Tropez, carrying illegal arms and ammunition, and a number of secret documents. Nor was I alone. I was part of a large conspiracy. That is all part of my record.

We have invited neighbors to dinner. The Gilles, a lovely couple, came, Daniel is a Director of the Parc du Luberon, Rosie is the Secretary of a Council of 53 Communes. We have not heard from them since and they live thirty meters away. Why? I asked Philomena. "Because you told them about working on the case of your friend the Soviet Spy." Maybe. Or maybe the wine was not of the best? Or they found my opinions too forceful? Or maybe they are shy?

But, do you know, I think that the French have lost a lot of their civil courage since the 1930's when I first visited them? They have had a police state, in one fashion or another, for about 25 out of 50 years since then.

Figure it out: the Nazis; the Petainists; the Fascist incursion from Italy; the Indo-Chinese War; the Algerian War; the military coup and Gaullist factionalism ("Hey," said Filly yesterday when I got a letter from SAC. "You had better watch out. SAC stands for Service d'Action Civique. They were and are the direct action Gaullist gang." Sorry, but a splinter group of Cosmic Heretics in England is now calling itself "Studies in Ancient Chronology," and they are after me, too); the Cold War with the Soviet East; and the isolation of France from NATO as a military and nuclear power, which engenders a lonely yet aggressive sentiment.

This is an area of second residences, one of the most beautiful in Europe. People come in the summer and go back to Paris and Dusseldorf and Brussels and Boston for their work. We left in the summer and came back in the winter -- for our work? What work? Writers. That's what they all say. Writers, like ballerinas, often mask their more shady calling, nor can the one write any better than the other can dance.

I would show them our published works if they would ask, but they would not ask because the game is not to deal directly with suspects; that would be cheating, or too much like granting us our claim. They have to stick by Falconian Maxim #1, the Richelieu Corollary, and the Filly Paradox. Anyhow, writers hardly ever live off their books.

However, there came a stage when the heat got to be too much for them. We had driven our Zastava car made in Poland under Italian Fiat license and sold in Greece where we have this cottage in a remote corner of an island (a stake-out?), therefore bearing an outlandish license with XY-1542 (imagine the two famous Greek letters, without sinister intent, followed by the 1-2, 5-4 kicker!) and arrived in Apt, where we would park every other day in some appropriate spot.

The flics could take it no longer. This time it was the Gendarmerie Nationale. I found a note on my windshield, a parking ticket? -- no -- a summons, "Report to Headquarters Gendarmerie, urgent!" We drove as fast as we could, after shopping, to the Impressive Headquarters, had our identification checked thoroughly, personal and vehicular both, exchanged pleasantries with one, then another officer, and were courteously au revoir'd.

These French are hard to figure out, very subtle, you know, awfully diplomatic, playing out string, then pulling it in. Jacques Chirac evoked a visa requirement for Americans suddenly around then; imagine, never mind that Reagan was in his gravest mood, actually stopped smiling, over terrorism, and Chirac was pretending to cooperate, and never mind that you cannot get into America unless the most anonymous clerk of the most kafkaesque bureaucracy in the world, the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice processes you somewhere between the secret and top-secret qualification, all in due course, here were the French asking me to get a visa.

Still -- you won't believe this and I don't blame you -- when I appeared After Hours at the French Consulate in New York to get what was announced as the longest visa possible, good for three years, without my asking they emerged from behind the counter with a five-year visa to come and go as I please vis-à-vis La Belle France. I can only imagine under the circumstances that they want me where they can get their hands on me, right here. And I have even been offered membership in the Military Club of Apt! When will they begin to draw in the string?

Nevertheless, I brought the car back to Greece and now have a car with a French license. In importing the Zastava, I thought we would have less trouble with a humble car instead of an expensive one, but I see that they caught onto that ploy. At first, too, I believed that they suspected us only of being Greek drug dealers connected with the Marseilles mob, and probably intending to deal with the troops stationed not so far away, always a good target for pushers. Especially with the good-looking chick in tow. Not so. They were after bigger prey -- spies?

I mention elsewhere my little Internationale of archaeologists of primeval sculptures. We number among us the geologist and archaeologist Claude Boise of Brignan, well-known, too, as a communist, when he is in a mood for politics. He is a veritable Hephaestus, a hobbling, bearded giant. But friendly and benevolent. The Police listen on his telephone line; he can hear them talking in their office while he is trying to make himself understood, so unconcerned are they about whether he knows of them.

If for no other reason, I love Boise's support of my own micro-chronology; he has come to think, too, that the Tertiary Period may have occurred only thousands, not millions of years ago, and that humankind quantavoluted, that is, erupted, hologenetically, with all aspects of behavior starting out together, art, language, crafts, sexuality, religion, etc. He finds such evidence now throughout the limestones and volcanics of the area. Now the French Deuxieme Bureau and Gendarmerie do not necessarily take me for a Soviet spy, even though they may have received the tip-off from the Swiss authorities. For they know that I could plausibly be an American operative. They are a smart bunch and may even have considered that I was working Marx out of here as a double spy, for the C.I.A. and the Soviet Union, with the idea of getting more secrets coming our way than going the other way, most of the latter secrets being Swiss anyhow.

On the other hand, they may suspect me myself of being a double spy, for on the one hand I have my Soviet branch through Marx and my American branch through Washington direct or perhaps through Marseilles, where there is a C.I.A. contact (oops!).

I have had no indication that my papers have been disturbed, but they are always in a state suggesting that they have been, so this means nothing.

I know this: that my papers are full of revolutionary documents and materials, having to do with my World Spy role and world government agitation, and my catastrophe and quantavolution documents are all over the place.

My shelves are warping under the load of boohooks and fugitive materials dealing with explosions, disasters, insurgencies, terrorism, geological explorations, economic dislocations in the world, and assorted machiavellian literature.

Furthermore, we have not one but three computers and two printers, all rare items in this part of the world. Minitel, modems, etc. all that junk, of course. No guns, ha, that's cinema. Luckily, I had the file of Marx letters with me, not that they could pin much of a case on them if they had found them here.

I suppose that, first of all, some secret types having nothing better to do will convince themselves that they must delve farther into my affairs. They will believe all that I've said here except my assurance that "this is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God." They will learn that I am out of the country. "-- Ah, we shall have to enter his house and search it for secret documents and who knows what else, hein?"

Now I don't mind so much this nuisance and violations of liberty and right. But what I fear is that they will mess up, cart away, and even vandalize my research papers and correspondence, which go all the way back to World War II and are a national treasure. What chance is there of this? Three per cent? Not much? But you wouldn't fly an airline that is 97% safe! Will it do any good, I wonder, to do what we do in New York City now after we have removed the radio and other valuables from our car when parking it: we put a note on the windshield saying: "No radio and nothing of value inside!"

Perhaps I should leave every scrap of paper connected with this book in a conspicuous pile right on my big brown chestnut desk table; I will label it, too, in French, as "Complete files of Fall of Spydom. There is nothing in it worthwhile but here you have it. You can get the key from Mme Le Havre, our neighbor, for further investigation. But I assure you, this is the truth... Je vous prie de croire, Messieurs, à l'expression de mes sentiments distingués. Alexander Falcone."

I might as well complete the circle of dyspionage. What will my American friends think when they get word of this? I'll say something more on the subject. What will they do? I suppose that the guys in Washington, prompted by the Swiss, the Man from Uncle in Bern, or the French will instruct the Man from Marseilles who will ask the French back again who will meet at the Club Militaire down the road from me in Apt and there exchange misinformation about me. (Even while I may be sitting at a nearby table, gulping down some moules.)

They will bid each other cordial wine-breathed adieus, and return to their offices pleased with their new material for my dossier.

But the Americans are not fools either. They'll check the deck, see my card has been withdrawn, and set on foot an inquiry as to whether I am working with the French (after all, they had initiated the inquiry -- or was it the French? -- no matter) and using Marx to get a French mole -- Leonidov himself, returned to the Soviet Union where he can be of use.

So now both the Americans and the French think that I may be working for the other, and setting things up in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Swiss feel that I may be working for either the French or the Americans, if not the Russians.

And don't forget, the French and the Americans have not abandoned the theory, although the evidence is not strong, that I may be working for the Russians via Marx and my presence here may be Soviet-inspired, a brilliant set-up, since Marx can have been transmitting to the Russians two streams of material, one the less valuable being the computer stuff out of Switzerland which the newspapers talked about and the Swiss Prosecutor referred to -- economic and general political espionage -- while the second stream, the more valuable, dealt with the stuff coming out of France, all the more disturbing since none of it turned up in the search of my premises and those of Marx. (The Joe McCarthy Principle.)

If what I suspect in the way of searches will be happening, I had just as well offer the gentlemen involved a schedule of visits so that they will not encounter one another needlessly and mess up the place.

That would throw further suspicion upon me as if I were trying to defend some secrets in my possession from seizure by secret service agents and I would be subject to sterner measures of surveillance and even interrogation, while the friends of the victim might even contemplate engaging in reprisals. I should feed Larzac raw meat.

I am beginning to feel twinges of panic. I must finish this book, because, at the very least, if not in time to explain everything to everyone's satisfaction, it will afford a small income to my widow. Provided that she emerges unscathed.

She is a big help! She goes and publishes in Le Monde, the most influential newspaper in France, an article in which she expresses alarm at a growing racism around the country and the increasing number of proto-Fascists, even particularly citing the statistics of the April elections in Saint-Martian, which give Le Pen the second highest vote in the Village, one of the highest Le Pen votes in France. Great! And then she puts it all onto me, lining me up squarely on the side of the angels. "This will help your image," she says. Fueling up the local rumor factory, I call it.

As if this were not enough, Le Quotidien de Paris sends down a reporter to counterattack its envied rival, Le Monde, by investigating us, and then prints a full page article with 11 errors of fact, 4 serious errors of omission, 3 logical contradictions, and 4 moral offenses. It decides that we are part of the snobbish Parisian dolce vita clan whose villas dot the lush hills of Provence, only pretending to be writers, and then, most damaging of all, quotes the Mayor of Saint-Martian, "Ce sont des gens de gauche, c'est quelqu'un qui a travaillé chez eux qui me l'a dit." So, we are of the Left, someone who worked in our house told him! Spies everywhere.

Or do my anxious twinges emanate from the complications of the process that I once thought to explain so simply?

Let me examine the possibilities: How many are there? Which are formidable and which trivial? Where do they all lead? What ought I to do?

It is all very well to syllogize, rationalize, cogitate, philosophize, dissect, abstract, formularize, mathematicize, ratiocinate, conspectate, machinate and cerebrate, but how do I climb down from this merry-go-round? And shall I take Marx with me, or leave him circling on his ruddy snorting bullock?

Suppose that I am a lone wolf operator. I could be working on my own behalf against the Swiss, French, Russians and Americans, selling and buying as the case arises, like a trafficker in weapons. The difference is that I have found sources of information, rather than weapons, that all the four governments would like to possess. (Although I could get hold of weapons, too.)

Next, suppose I work for one against one, or two, or three of the others.

Or suppose that I work for two against the one or two others. I might be working for the Kalos movement, and not for money, a more likely possibility. If the two are regarded as distinct possibilities, I would have eighteen of them.

If I were suspected to have employed Marx in all these regards there would occur thirty-six possibilities. In fact, considering that I could use Marx, he could use me, and we both could work for one or more of the four countries against one or more of the four, and that we both may be interested in the greater glory of quantavolution and/or Kalos World Union and/or the Great Goddess Venus, the number of solutions as to who might be spying, with whom, for whom, and against whom, exceeds one hundred!

If the possibility of my being here or there in the capacity of an industrial spy for a great American multinational company, which shall remain unnamed, the possibilities again go up, considering that I shall not renounce my loyalty to Kalotic World Unity for the large sums paid to me by the corporate client.

To investigate, store and analyze something like 200 possibilities, a computer system and facility is needed, one of a size, complexity and activity that should give Chris Marx honest employment worthy of his talents for the hours of nine to one daily, after which he can tend to saving the world in his own way, by releasing all and sundry, from the cafés of Paris to the farthest atoll of rioting Caledonians, and yea, verily, the far-flung American and Soviet empires, from the Venus Spy-Trap.

Do not for a moment think that the burden of carrying all of these identities, which are true or false depending upon the situation at a given moment, is too heavy for me or Marx or even yourself. There have been well documented cases of schizophrenics who have lived truthfully, sincerely, effectively, whether by day or night, and relating to all kinds of people, in three, five, seven, nine, and seventeen different roles. I have seen a documented case of forty identities in a single woman. What a gal!

"Never underestimate the inutterable competence and madness of the human mind!" (Maxim #22.)

Otherwise this is all quite absurd. Most of the possibilities can be eliminated by normal reasoning processes and one will quickly arrive at the level where I could be operating in a mere dozen capacities or less, and that I would have to defend myself against suspicion and allegations in these and no more. Lucky that I am!

However, no possibility is too remote for persons laboring on this earth under the Eye of Saturn.