Espionage: None Dare...pp. 64-67

 I play a lot of strategy games on my computer. For some reason, they just make sense there, where the console is for all of the other types of games. One thing that I never neglect, is establishing a web of spies (when I'm able). In the old Red Alert, I would spend an inordinate amount of time training spies because sure, the Russians were coming but I wanted to know every single thing they had in production. I just like it. The new Civ has a really great espionage mechanism, and I love sabotaging and stealing all of my rival's stuff. Sure, they own two continents and our trade is so intertwined that war between us is almost impossible...but for some reason, they just can't get that spaceship built can they.

The reason that I bring this up is because of one important feature about espionage: it doesn't work if the enemy knows it is happening. So when Allen tries to link the trade with the USSR (which is one of the things that prevented the outbreak of a hot war) with the Russian espionage in the US, it's straight-up bullshit. The two are unrelated events happening at the same time. 

The book is trying to get us to believe that it was because "They" had control over both countries that the trade was allowed to flourish while at the same time the espionage network flourished. This raises the question: is the USSR really the enemy then? Well, let's play it out:

In Allen's worldview, both the USSR and the US are controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and whatever other right-wing boogeyman he wants to throw in the mix (at this point in conspiracy theory history though--the CFR is the big one). The struggle between the two powers then is a ploy and the Russian Gary Allen would be writing the same thing from the opposite perspective: "Why does Kruschev allow American capitalist pigs to build factories over here?" This means it's all a song and dance designed to distract us. This is Allen's belief so far, but playing this out further it also means that our real allies are not the US government but the average Russian who is also being lied to. Further, this means that when Allen wants his war with the USSR, he actually wants the US government (the liars) to kill the average Russian (who would be our true ally if not for the great deceptions). 

People like Allen have to balance their desire to be right with their desire to see the "normal" enemy dead. There is an overlap of people that think 9/11 was an inside job and people that believe that the Muslims need to be stopped at all costs. Why? According to your conspiracy theory, the Muslims weren't responsible so why should we need to stop them? Coherency isn't a hallmark of conspiracy theories.

The trade tirade continues and I'm realizing my problem: I don't want to fact-check all of this. Allen's list of goods being traded to the USSR is, as follows: 

"The United States put into effect today one of President Johnson's proposals for stimulating East-West trade by removing restrictions on the export of more than four hundred commodities to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. . . . Among the categories from which items have been selected for export relaxation are vegetables, cereals, fodder, hides, crude and manufactured rubber, pulp and waste paper, textiles and textile fibers, crude fertilizers, metal ores and scrap, petroleum, gas and derivatives, chemical compounds and products, dyes, medicines, fireworks, detergents, plastic materials, metal products and machinery, and scientific and professional instruments."

These items are claimed, by the US to be of non-strategic value. The list comes from a New York Times article from October of 1966. I'm going to assume that he's reprinting it correctly. These trade items are basically food and raw materials. In Allen's world trading the USSR hides and waste paper is tantamount to just giving them nuclear weapons and ripping up the Constitution. Do you know what is missing from Allen's rant? What we got in return for it. They didn't pay us in rubles. International trade is what keeps us from killing each other and if Allen had anything more than an angry dilettantes understanding of international affairs he'd want more trade not less. 

The trade stuff is boring because Allen has his argument built on a misunderstanding of how trade works and why it is important. He name-drops the CFR's secret membership to keep people reading, but I think even he is getting bored by this. Then he gets to patents and he misunderstands something else so hard that I can't skip it. His claim is, "Since the Rockefellers have contracted to arrange for patents for the Soviets, they are by dictionary definition Communist agents. Would it not be more accurate to define the Communists as Rockefeller agents?"

Backing up a bit, Allen is claiming that the Rockefellers, Tower international (A Canadian oil/metal company run by Cyrus Eaton), and the AMTORG company (the Soviet international group that deals in patents) control all of the patent tradings in the world. Eaton, he claims is pro-Soviet, and this is true if you count--not wanting to start a nuclear war as pro-Soviet. Eaton's real motive was greed, if war started, he would have lost a lot of money so it was in his interest to keep the peace--which is good. Right conclusion, but the wrong way to get there. 

Anyway, trade licensure doesn't work, again, the way Allen thinks it does. When the US sells the right to construct F-22s to Israel, Israel doesn't get the same F-22 that we do. It's largely the same but ours is more advanced. They also have kill switches in them that do not allow them to be used against the US or our allies. This is how Iran has a dozen or so F-15 Eagle fighter planes but absolutely cannot use them. 

Allen claims that that 50k dead in Vietnam is on the Rockefellers for this kind of trade. The US forbids the selling of weapons to the USSR but not the materials to make them. So his conclusion is that we sell them the metal and that metal gets turned into Ak-47s. If this were true, Allen's problem isn't the sale of metal it's the fault of the capitalist system that allows the sale of the metal to the Russians. His problem isn't the Communists, it's the war in Vietnam--which I have yet to hear him speak against. If "the Insiders" control everything then they control the war too. He should be calling for the ending of the war along with the arrest of "the insiders." He's not though, because this emotional gambit doesn't need to make sense.