HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THE YAZIDIS?
We'll return to the School of Tom Clancy for Book Review No. 1 in 2017. This time it's Mark Greaney's True Faith and Allegiance, and it's much more compelling than Grant Blackwood's Duty and Honor, which merited a perfunctory, disappointed review toward the end of 2016. I'm not the only Clancy enthusiast to note differences in performance among the matriculants of his school, and a number of even more unhappy readers of Duty were looking forward to True Faith.
The question I raise in the title is one that President Jack Ryan raises as part of a truly refreshing b****slap of some CNN reporter. I hope that there are people on Team Trump studying the fictional President Ryan, both for the national security nuggets and the tools of the trade for dealing with the Democrat operatives with bylines in the Briefing Room.
The book itself? I've been following CBS's Hunted, which does not feature the Hounds of Zaroff on Ship-Trap Island, but it has a number of comfortable people attempting to hide themselves, for four weeks, from a team of intelligence officers who have full use of open-source intelligence such as Facebook profiles, plus use of traffic cameras, plus the impossible cluelessness of many of the contestants and their friends. You know you're playing a reality show and you'll get an hour notice to vamoose, and you don't have a rudimentary bug-out bag with you at all times? Your friends and social media accomplices know you're playing a reality show, and when the intelligence officers come to their house and use all their interrogator tricks and they haven't been briefed to say only, ONLY "You're not real cops. You don't have a warrant. You don't need to know?" (Extra points if the friend threatens to call the real cops, something a nosy neighbor might have had cause to in at least one hunt.) Sad. And you've never worked out enough knowledge of the back roads to find ways to get to where you want to go without passing the traffic cameras?
That's not to mention that neighbors who have not been briefed in on the game have shown a disturbing tendency to be too cooperative with these performers. Back to the book.
Suppose you have a security clearance, and you know all the personal security techniques, But a miscreant has obtained the background check form you filled in to be vetted before you got that Delta Force or CIA posting. How safe are you, dear reader, when that miscreant cross-references your close friends and family with their current social media activity, and you don't know that bad people with automatic weapons are hunting you?
There are a few more plot twists, plus, possibly, the introduction of additional cast members, but I've disclosed more than enough for today. Happy reading.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
The question I raise in the title is one that President Jack Ryan raises as part of a truly refreshing b****slap of some CNN reporter. I hope that there are people on Team Trump studying the fictional President Ryan, both for the national security nuggets and the tools of the trade for dealing with the Democrat operatives with bylines in the Briefing Room.
The book itself? I've been following CBS's Hunted, which does not feature the Hounds of Zaroff on Ship-Trap Island, but it has a number of comfortable people attempting to hide themselves, for four weeks, from a team of intelligence officers who have full use of open-source intelligence such as Facebook profiles, plus use of traffic cameras, plus the impossible cluelessness of many of the contestants and their friends. You know you're playing a reality show and you'll get an hour notice to vamoose, and you don't have a rudimentary bug-out bag with you at all times? Your friends and social media accomplices know you're playing a reality show, and when the intelligence officers come to their house and use all their interrogator tricks and they haven't been briefed to say only, ONLY "You're not real cops. You don't have a warrant. You don't need to know?" (Extra points if the friend threatens to call the real cops, something a nosy neighbor might have had cause to in at least one hunt.) Sad. And you've never worked out enough knowledge of the back roads to find ways to get to where you want to go without passing the traffic cameras?
That's not to mention that neighbors who have not been briefed in on the game have shown a disturbing tendency to be too cooperative with these performers. Back to the book.
Suppose you have a security clearance, and you know all the personal security techniques, But a miscreant has obtained the background check form you filled in to be vetted before you got that Delta Force or CIA posting. How safe are you, dear reader, when that miscreant cross-references your close friends and family with their current social media activity, and you don't know that bad people with automatic weapons are hunting you?
There are a few more plot twists, plus, possibly, the introduction of additional cast members, but I've disclosed more than enough for today. Happy reading.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)