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For quite some time I’ve been a fan of the BBC One series entitled MI-5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5). I’ve been renting the series discs from Netflix. It’s a well-done spy/espionage weekly thriller with great cast members and excellent scripts. Scary scripts.
Though it’s fiction, it follows the same course that most spy novels, movies, and other TV shows follow but it’s much edgier than many I’ve read/watched. We are more sophisticated in the 2000s (mostly) and we all know these agencies exist. The secrecy factor is along the lines of: what we don’t know won’t hurt us. In fact, what we don’t know helps us sleep. Some episodes are extremely frightening because they are based on actual events and “behind the scenes” action that takes place while we are all glued to our TVs during major world events. We know details are not being shared but we also know it’s for security purposes. It’s hard to move between fact and fiction in this series, that’s how well it’s done.
Often they script nasty arguments between international spy agencies including our own CIA and even within their own MI organization, particularly MI-6, the section above theirs with considerably more clout. Even though the semi-cooperative agencies help each other from time to time to combat a bio terrorism act or the possible dropping of a nuke on London, in the blink of an eye they often turn on each other to save their own agency and/or country (or themselves as individual spies). Sometimes they even turn on fellow agents and sometimes become double agents. I never understood how anyone could be a double agent, but in one episode they had a story line where one of their top agents did just that and she did it because she truly thought it would change the course of a disaster that was about to happen. She was right but paid the ultimate price for her duplicity.
In addition to the very scary weekly “events” scripted, which are exciting to watch and there’s lots of action, they include a heavy dose of how things work in the spy world. Some of this isn’t new. We’ve seen it in other films or read it in novels or spy “tell alls” or even watched it unfold on TV. What I’ve learned is, the public never really knows the full story, and in many cases other agencies and even other sections within each organization, may never really know the full story. Sometimes only a handful of people truly know how a situation is resolved and sometimes those people end up as the Godfather might say, sleeping with the fishes.
The deals that are made, even with our enemies, are crazy. Sometimes concessions are made that are so outrageous that I can’t imagine that would truly happen in the real world. Yet, these themes pop up so frequently in spy novels and movies that there just must be an element of truth in it. The wheeling and dealing that takes place out of the view of the citizens of the world is just mind-boggling.
When I heard the story in the news that the Lockerbie Pan Am Flight 103 murderer Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was being released back to his home country, so that he could die while surrounded by loved ones, my immediate thought was: someone struck a deal. A big one. The fact that the man has maintained his innocence should have no bearing on the fact he was found guilty. It’s the justice system we have in the civilized world and we must abide by the verdict. The man is guilty. He says he’s innocent but so does Scott Peterson.
The first news reports were all about outrage at his release. Over the following days many speculated that some sort of trade deal was struck. I do not believe I’m a conspiracy theorist at heart but I have a healthy respect for doubt. I doubt he’s innocent and I believe a very important person who is being held somewhere in a foreign land, perhaps a spy (don’t laugh) is on his or her way home at this very moment. Or a vital piece of strategic information has traded hands quietly for some future purpose of enormous magnitude. Something big has been given to the “west” in exchange for this murderer to be released. Humanitarian reasons? B.S. And I don’t believe it has anything to do with trade.
We are all fed a routine diet of watered down news that isn’t news at all. It’s scripted crappola that the newsreaders deliver to us and because we are complacent as a society we nod our heads then switch the TV to The Kardashians. We are brainwashed into thinking what we see on the news is true and that The Kardashians are an interesting family. Oh, please.
For the sake of the safety of operations and activities conducted by our secret agencies, we can’t possibly know the details of how they operate. It can’t work that way. But we don’t have to believe everything we hear about some of these news events. Abdel Baset al-Megrahi has terminal, final stage prostate cancer. If he doesn’t die very soon a big trick has been played on us all. However, if he does die soon, we may never know if it was the cancer or an assisted death to settle world outrage. Think about it. I’m sure he does.
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