It’s a funny old world and no mistaking it. The following
story made its way into The Rusty Wire Service’s dead letter drop and given that
we love both literature and the endlessly diverting shenanigans of the global
securocrat community, this was right there in our sweet spot.
According to the link provided by my helpful correspondent (click
here), the author of the following account is John Sifton, an attorney at Human
Rights Watch. He worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to 2004 and was
senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism from 2005 to 2007. He is
currently the Asia Advocacy Director.
“The first thing I did after I heard about the highly
classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in
Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A literary flight of
fancy. I started sending back excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.
The cantankerous Seymour Hersh was my inspiration. He had
told me about the program in a clipped expletive-filled summary in the summer
of 2011: “They’re scooping fucking everything, man! Phones, Internet, the whole
works.”
I didn’t exactly believe him. He had also told me in 2008
that the Bush administration was close to authorizing airstrikes on Iran. So I
treated his new pronouncement as a possibility, a sign from a questionable but
often accurate oracle. I had wanted to rebel. The idea of esoteric poetry and
prose in the NSA’s vaults appealed to me. “Yes,” I said to myself. “Yes I
will.” And so I set out to tell Joyce’s story of a Chapelizod family, in a new
way.
I acknowledge now, of course, that the venture was not the
wisest idea. Certainly after I was indicted I regretted the hoax. My wife has
had her regrets, too. Signing over your house to a law firm is a humbling
experience, and for my wife, a clarifying one.
I will not acknowledge, however, that my actions were illegal.
I admit only that the idea was pretentious. I never meant to prove anything. I
am no Edward Snowden, except perhaps in my sheer eagerness. It was the idea of
CIA analysts’ consternation that set me alight, coded al-Qaeda email messages
embedded in Joyce’s chaotic phonetic sing-song:
Tark's bimboowood so pleasekindly communicake with the
original sinse we are only yearning as yet how to burgeon.
It's
meant milliems of centiments deadlost or mislaid on them
but,
master of snakes, we can sloughchange in the nip of a napple
solongas we can allsee for deedsetton your quick.
My answers to these emails, in Hopkins’ alliterative lyric,
had the author’s pause and accent marks, a little touch to drive the CIA
analysts nuts:
Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will
end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the
tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it.
My mistake was making the ruse plausible. I used an email
address in Pakistan similar to that used by an al-Qaeda courier from Waziristan
whose messages had been intercepted in the 2009 Zazi case, a failed bombing
plot on New York City. A long shot, but the best I could come up with at the
time. It seemed unlikely that NSA computers, vacuuming it all up, would flag the
emails, since neither I, nor my phantom, was linked to any actual al-Qaeda
couriers. “Suck on this, NSA,” I would mutter to myself, as I sent the stuff
out.
. . . .The spearspid of dawnfire totouches ain the
tablestoane ath the centre of the great circle of the
macroliths of
Helusbelus in the boshiman brush on this our peneplain by
Fan-
galuvu Bight whence the horned cairns erge, stanserstanded,
to floran frohn, idols of isthmians. Overwhere. Gaunt grey
ghostly gossips growing grubber in the glow. Past now pulls.
Cur one beast, even Dane the Great, may treadspath with
sniffer he snout impursuant to byelegs. Edar's chuckal
humuristic.
Even if the emails were to be flagged, I figured any
analyst’s scan of the text, a simple Google search, would reveal the passages
to be from a work of literature.
But no one has ever kept out of trouble relying on the
competence of the United States government. I suspect it was the following
passage that did me in, from page 261 of Finnegans Wake:
Terror of the noonstruck by day,
cryptogam of each nightly bridable. But, to
speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he?
When the FBI showed up, my heart truly was struck with
terror. The prospect of explaining the texts—it was possible, but I had a
secret and awful shame: I didn’t actually understand some of them. The Hopkins
texts I could perhaps handle, but Finnegans Wake?
There is nothing more frightening for a pseudo-intellectual
than to be called out to explain something he does not actually understand. I
cancelled my first appointment with the feds—Special Agents O’Brien and
Bloom—just to brush up. The fact that one of the agents was named Bloom filled
me with foreboding. I spent 48 hours reading secondary texts to assure myself
of relevant theories of textual interpretation. I didn’t want to sound
uninformed. Notes from the interviews would become part of the permanent
historical record. It filled me with anguish to think of my sons reading the
FBI Form 302 interview notes decades later and realizing their father was a
fraud.
I was shaky in the first meeting. But to my relief, O’Brien
and Bloom asked first not about the emails, but rather my work for Human Rights
Watch, my travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bloom, amazingly, was the good
cop. We went over my work history. My contacts with Afghan and Pakistani
government officials. My work investigating CIA torture and secret prisons. I
probably should have asked to have an attorney present. I should have called
Human Rights Watch’s General Counsel. But fearful and arrogant, I did not.
Then the other shoe dropped. O’Brien brushed aside the
prologue and laid out the emails – the one with the words “terror” and
“cryptogam” – and another I had sent in 2011:
Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ' upon, áll on
twó spools;
párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—black, white;
' right, wrong;
reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell,
each off the óther;
of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, '
thóughts agaínst
thoughts ín groans grínd.
I read over the text. O’Brien looked disgusted.
“Can you just—explain yourself?” he said. An effacing
affront. It badly shook me.
“It’s a poem.” I said.
Are there three more pathetic words in the English language?
It’s a poem.
I retreated sideways. “It’s about the world being divided
into two types, right and wrong.” I was terribly embarrassed. “It’s about how
the conflict between right and wrong persists in…” I hesitated, “our thoughts.”
I am not an literary scholar. You try it sometime. At least
he didn’t ask me to scan it.
“It looks like code,” O’Brien said. “Who would write like
this on purpose?”
“Well, it’s sort of like code.” I smiled weakly. “There are
tricks, like ‘skeined stained veined’, it’s like the leaves of a tree. Or
‘reckon but, reck but.’ Word games.”
“So you’re admitting its code?” O’Brien raised his eyebrows.
“You tried to cue them for it by writing ‘cryptogam’.”
“No, no” I said, too eagerly.
“What is the code? What does this say in plain English? This
‘selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless?’ – what is this shit?”
My earnestness was like a disease, eating away at my sense
of confidence.
“It’s about how we torture ourselves with all our thoughts.
. . There’s this rack . . . where
thoughts grind against other thoughts. That’s what it says…” I petered out.
“You’re writing about Abu Ghraib – about torture. This is
some recruitment thing?”
I tend to withdraw when I get nervous. The situation was now
so upsetting that I’d lost the capacity for interaction. I avoided O’Brien’s
gaze and looked down at the email text to which the Hopkins poem was a
response, from the end of Finnegans Wake:
Remember Bomthomanew vim vam vom
Hungerig. Hoteform, chain and epolettes, botherbumbose. And
I’ll be your aural eyeness.
“I would like to request an attorney be present for the rest
of our interview,” I said.
* * * *
So my troubles began.
I had imagined that when I met my attorney, his first
question would be of an existential nature. Something like: “Why did you do it?”
But criminal defense lawyers don’t ask questions like that.
My lawyer’s first question was: “How did you find out about PRISM?” What a
relief that was.
It isn’t easy to find criminal defense attorneys who have
security clearance to be read in on a classified intelligence program. They are
also very expensive, a fact that my wife has reminded me of on several
occasions. However, they are very professional and get straight to the point.
The firm coached me for my subsequent interviews, and my
attorney carefully walked me through the proper responses.
Lucky for me, most of my subsequent interviews were mundane.
More questions about Pakistan, more explaining the Hopkins texts. It was
amazing they asked about Hopkins more than the Joyce. In one interview with the
agents I had to explain the word “dapple”:
For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end,
astray or aswarm,
all throughther, in
throngs; ' self ín self steedèd and páshed—qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ' áll now.
“It means contrast,” I said, the enthusiastic student.
“Color juxtapositions. Like green and red and blue. ‘Dapple is at an end’ means
it’s getting dark and you can’t see colors anymore.”
Special Agent O’Brien was writing in his notes: “dapple =
contrast.”
“And ‘pashed’?” he asked, looking over his glasses.
“It means ‘broken,’”
I could see him writing the words down. My heart sank as I
read them: “End of right and wrong. Breaking. Dismembering.” The last word
underlined, twice.
My attorneys had to work hard to untangle it all.
* * * *
Months later, as part of my plea agreement, I was obliged to
give a deposition to the US Attorney’s office. It was at this point that my
story reached its climax and moral.
My attorneys and I sat on one side of a long table, the US
attorneys and special agents on the other, a stenographer in the corner. The
situation vindicated my wife’s opinion that I am a fool.
But having the Special Prosecutor himself involved at that
point – Pat Fitzgerald – was a great relief. He struck me as reasonable and
intellectual, and he was Irish to boot.
Indeed, the deposition started off smoothly. Fitzgerald
seemed to immediately understand the farcical nature of the enterprise,
treating the plea agreement as a way to brush the whole embarrassing matter
under the rug.
Of course, he needed to fill out the particulars. He had to
show his colleagues in the intelligence community that my venture was only a
pathetic trick: an ‘intellectual’ stunt by a conceited narcissist, played on an
unsuspecting victim, the U.S. government – basically the most pretentious type
of crime imaginable. There were some in the intelligence community who continued
to think I was lying.
Most of Fitzgerald’s questions were straightforward, about
the technical details. At the end of the deposition, however, the questions
veered into the morass.
“So, this text – Finnegans Wake – can you summarize the plot
for the record?”
Fearful, I was struck dumb. My attorneys asked for the
videotape to be stopped.
“We have to object, Pat – he’s already said in the
interviews, the plot itself is a matter of textual interpretation. Each word of
the text is open to multiple interpretations. There are potentially an infinite
number of plots.”
“Um, ok, that’s ok,” Fitzgerald responded. “I’m not trying
to lay a trap here.”
He smiled kindly. “Just give one interpretation,” he said in
an encouraging voice, like an 8th grade English teacher. The deposition
continued.
I swallowed hard before speaking. I felt very fragile, like
a teenager.
“The book is about a family from a suburb of Dublin,” I
began. “It’s about them. There isn’t really – a plot so much. . .”
Fitzgerald and his colleagues looked at me with bovine eyes.
I felt the dread one feels in the silence of eternal spaces.
“The main character is a man named Humphrey Chimpden
Earwicker,” I said. Here I go, I thought. I felt so self-conscious it almost
hurt. “He goes by his initials, HCE. The acronym is then used for other names
and jokes, like, for instance ‘Here Comes Everybody” or ‘Howth Castle and
Environs” or ‘Hag Chivychas Eve.’ Stuff like that. There are a lot of puns and
made up-words.”
“Like ‘cryptogam,’ for instance?” said Fitzgerald. “I take
it that that’s not a typo.”
“Actually cryptogam is a real word.” My attorneys had
suggested it might come to this. “It’s a plant that doesn’t reproduce with
seeds. Like a mushroom or algae. Or moss and ferns.”
The stenographer clicked away in the corner. The words “moss
and ferns” had become part of the case record.
“I see,” Fitzgerald said, writing in his notes. “Well, it’s
very interesting.” He seemed to be honestly interested. “So, for the record,
you’re saying ‘cryptogam’ does not refer to code?”
“No!” I said, too energetically. “It’s mushrooms. Yeast.
That sort of thing.”
Fitzgerald’s team wrote steadily in their notes. My
nervousness pushed me on.
“There are a lot of references to mushrooms and yeast in
Joyce,” I said. My attorney touched my arm lightly, but I ran on.
“Look—” I took the book up, “There’s a part late in the
book. . . Here, page 613. Halfway down the page.” I pushed it across to
Fitzgerald:
A spathe of calyptrous glume involucrumines the perinanthean
Amenta:
fungoalgaceous
muscafilicial graminopalmular planteon; of increasing,
livivorous,
feelful
thinkamalinks;
luxuriotiating everywhencewhithersoever among skullhullows
and
charnelcysts of
a
weedwastewoldwevild. . .
“See? Fungoalgaceous muscafilicial,” I said. “It’s a
portmanteau of different types of cryptogams.”
The stenographer interrupted here, her north Baltimore
accent like a knitting needle stuck in my ear. “Are those words in that book?”
she asked, “Because – otherwise you’re going to have to spell them.”
She was waved off by one of the US attorneys.
Fitzgerald read the text, or looked at the letters anyway,
and then he looked at me again. A kind, blank, innocent look. Unaware of the
fear he was instilling in me, not knowing what he was doing, he suddenly
twisted the knife.
“And why would someone write like this?”
My silence now. “Why?” I repeated, meekly. I was devastated.
“Just your opinion. A short explanation.” Absolute innocence
in asking the question.
My hands began trembling. One of his assistants looked at
the clock.
“I don’t know, sir – honestly I don’t.”
I felt the way I did as a child, fighting tears. Who could
say why this was. Was it my dark secret, emerging into my consciousness, that
despite my provocative line of work, all my life I have wanted to answer
questions posed by people in authority – people like Pat Fitzgerald? At this
point, it seemed that even O’Brien was smiling in encouragement and sympathy. I
had never seen him smile before, yet there it was: a subtle and kind pursing of
lips under his dark mustache.
My epiphany came here. These people had provided me more
love and sympathy than anyone ever had. While Joyce, Hopkins, Proust,
Shakespeare – what of their childishness? In vanity, they had sought
immortality in their endeavors, an assurance that their texts would be
preserved for all of time. And yet, here the government had actually done it –
no, something even more magnanimous, and not just for authors but for all of
us: everything written now preserved for evermore – and if the United States of
America had her way, it would be until the end of time. Our immortality in the
mineral composition of database drives. We “mortal trash” would “fall to the
residuary worm,” as Hopkins wrote, and yet fools like me – a “Jack, joke, poor
potsherd” – would be “immortal diamond.”
I felt an immense shame. I had been such a stubborn person
to exile myself from these people. Almost four decades of life wasted in
rebellion. Two tears trickled down the sides of my nose.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking down, the tears now blinding
my vision. But it was all right now, I didn’t need to answer Fitzgerald’s
question. Everything was going to be all right, the struggle was finished. I
had learned to love the government.
And with that, my persecution ended."
The foregoing has been reproduced from the website Warscapes
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