Dear Comrade Putin...

The master of the long con..... or is he?

Dear Comrade Putin -

It has been so many years since we were both young KGB officers, working in the basement of the Lubyanka building in Moscow, torturing dissidents and murdering CIA spies.   The sounds of their screams and cries for mercy!   Even back then, you showed a special talent!  Good times, to be sure.  I miss them.  I see you do not!  Keep up the good work!  By the way, what made you think up Polonium?  That was brilliant, quite frankly.

But as you know, since those days, I have been living here in deep cover in the United States.   And on the eve of my retirement, I wanted to bring you up to date on our efforts here, which very shortly may come to fruition, after decades of hard work.

As you know, we realized early on in the history of the USSR, that taking down the United States of America would be our number-one goal.  But even Comrades Lenin and Stalin realized it was a long-term project, something that would take decades, maybe even a century or more.   Not only that, we realized that it would only happen if we could rot American society from within, as a direct military attack simply wouldn't work, as they have the largest military in the world, by far.

So we planted agents - dozens and hundreds of them - in the United States, not to spy or sabotage in the traditional sense, but to undermine the society with a few well-placed words here and there - to tip the scales of public opinion one way or another.

And our strategy has worked - we take America's strengths and get their population to perceive them as weaknesses.   It is so simple that it is beautiful to witness.

You may recall, before my watch, our plans were nearly exposed during the 1950's with the "Red Scare."  It was fortunate that we were able to "turn" young Mr. Cohn to our side, and destroy McCarthy, who was destined to fail in any event.   But more than that, we were able to make the US into the bad guy - giving the population a sense that their own government was evil and over-reaching.  Even today, people mistrust their own government because of that era.   So in the end, we won, twice.

Of course, when the Soviet Union fell (or as we like to call it, the great strategic retreat) some KGB records did fall into the wrong hands.   But by then, Americans were just not interested to find out that Alger Hiss was indeed one of our operatives, or that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did indeed sell us the secrets to the H-Bomb.   By then the narrative of "wrongly convicted" was so ingrained into the national psyche, that the actual truth made no difference.

And that narrative has helped us, over the years, to undermine confidence in their own judicial system - arguably one of the best in the world.   Believe it or not, most Americans believe that the criminals locked up in their jails are mostly innocent and that their own prison system constitutes cruel and unusual punishment!  Ah, if they had only seen you at work at Lubyanka with the blowtorch and pliers!  But what American's don't know could fill encyclopedias.

My goals over the years have been to attack and undermine American culture, industry, and commerce.   I arrived in the middle of the 1960's "counter-culture" movement, which we directed to our own ends.   We were actually able to convince the children of the wealthiest country on the planet that their entire society was corrupt and vile!   I was amazed at the time that it was so easy to influence public opinion, but since those days, I am less and less surprised.   But we managed to derail an entire generation with a potent mix of absurdist politics, loud music, and recreational drugs.

Of course, by the mid-1970's, I was getting too old to infiltrate youth groups, and besides, our work there was done - the drug epidemic was already on auto-pilot, with generation after generation of youth becoming addicted to ever more powerful drugs.   Some of our younger agents were influential in popularizing cocaine, crack, methamphetamine, and now opiates, into America society.  A country with such a long history of drug abuse!  You would think they would have learned by now.  Each new generation goes down the same road - with increasingly dire results.

In the meantime, I went on to bigger and better things.  Taking Comrade Stalin's famous quote, "Make their strengths their weaknesses!" I set about to help dismantle American society from within.   "What were American's strengths?" I thought.   And it hit me that in addition to its fantastic wealth and manufacturing capability, its invention and technology, that Americans have the best food supply in the world - and in fact export food to nearly every country in the world - even Mother Russia!

If we could get Americans to distrust their own food supply, we could destroy their greatest strength!   We started modestly enough by pushing stories that certain foods or food types were bad for your health.   And Americans, having so much rich food, were often in bad health - not by global standards, of course, but compared to other Western countries that were not as wealthy.

We first came up with the "low fat" craze - convincing Americans that their beef, butter, cheese, and milk were basically poisons.  It only took some funding of "research" to produce a few papers, which when taken out of context, created a panic among the population.

We attacked sugar next, then salt.   The very foods that the rest of the world had in short supply, we had Americans turning away!  It was beautiful.  And it goes without saying that any story related to adulteration of food or the use preservatives or chemicals, we made sure was promoted and distributed.   By the 1980's, most Americans were convinced their food supply was tainted and in fact, killing them.  They didn't even trust their own water supply - arguably the best in the world!

My most recent accomplishment, I have to say, I owe to my wife, who is also a dedicated agent for the Motherland.   We were driving across Kansas, and we saw miles upon miles of endless wheat fields.   I was musing that the United States was surely the breadbasket of the world, with all this wheat.  How could we possibly undermine this aspect of their country?   My wife chimed in that she had a friend who actually had a wheat allergy due to a rare illness.   I thought about it, and said, "That's it!  We just need to convince the majority of Americans that they too, have this rare illness!"   

It wasn't easy, but gluten-free was born.   I still laugh about it - we convinced ordinary Americans that bread - the very stuff of life - is somehow poisonous to them.  They are so easily lead!

Of course, our greatest accomplishments are yet to come.   We have divided the country by race, gender, religion, and whatever other "identity" we can parse out.   We have turned one segment of the population against another.   We've convinced poor working whites that poor working blacks are their greatest enemy instead of a potential allay (we cannot take credit for that idea - the Ku Klux Klan came up with that after the Civil War, we just ran with it).  We have turned the rich against the poor and the middle-class against everyone.

I cannot take credit for the technology sector, but my fellow agents have instilled a sense of dread, fear, and anxiety among Americans about their own technology - the greatest in the world.   "Strengths into Weaknesses!" - indeed!   Americans are convinced that their cars are unsafe and that the government is spying on them with their cell phones.   We had even started a program to convince people that their WiFi routers were giving them cancer - but that never took off in a real sense, except among the fringe.

The young people, however, are now convinced that "chemtrails" are emitting from jet airplanes - a particular bit of brilliance by an agent in New York, which started as actual satire.  The story I heard was, he asked a fellow agent in a bar, what was the most ridiculous thing he could get young Americans to believe.   What started as  bar-bet turned into a whole conspiracy movement!

Since they, we've stopped wondering what crazy shit we can get Americans to believe in.   I think we almost went too far with "pizzagate" - which again started as a bar bet between two competing agents.  We need to make these rumors at least somewhat plausible, although it seems Americans are so gullible at this point as to believe anything.

Destroying confidence in their health care system has taken longer, but has produced fantastic results as you well know by now.   It is one issue that had divided Americans more than any other.  Americans are convinced today that their health care system is the worst in the world - not realizing that most modern medical techniques, medicines, and medical devices, are developed in their own country!   We've even gotten them to reject the idea of vaccines, which was a particularly brilliant move by one of our agents posing as as housewife in California.   We've found the Internet and so-called "Social Media" the most excellent channel for spreading influence and unfounded rumors.

And now, our crowning achievement, we have a "useful idiot" in the White House, ready and willing to do our bidding.  I exhort you, dear comrade, however, to be careful.   The placement of our ultimate mole has been somewhat awkward and obvious, and a large part of the population is more than a little suspicious about our activities.   It is becoming readily apparent to many people that our long-term plans and even the great strategic retreat are all part of a long-game to undermine America and make it collapse from within.

These types of operations need to be handled with the greatest of care - you need only push here, suggest there, influence here - and people will fall into the fold.  But it must not be obvious that they are being influenced or the game is up.

While I don't mean to criticize, dear comrade, your recent efforts, while they did accomplish much - our first President! - were a bit heavy-handed, and further investigations into our activities might expose the entire game. Such exposure would, well, set us back decades, if not back to the beginning.

I hope you take these comments in the spirit they are offered and don't send me any Polonium-laced packages (ha-ha! Just kidding! - right?).   We are so close to our goal now, I want to enjoy my retirement watching the US of A finally collapse from within.

Yours Truly,

--Agent 86



UPDATE:  A reader writes that this letter is an elaborate "conspiracy theory" but it was intended as humor.  Whether the events in this narrative happened by accident or design, they had the same effect - to embolden our enemies and weaken our country.

But.... it is not a conspiracy theory per se, but a reality.  Every country in the world uses agents to influence public opinion in other countries.   During the height of the cold war, our own CIA swayed elections in many Latin American and 3rd world countries, or just ousted elected officials and installed brutal dictators.

You do know how Saddam Hussein and the "Shah" of Iran came into power, right?  Not by accident, I assure you.

And the Soviets did the same thing, latching onto social trends and diverting them to their own ends.   We find out 50 years later that the "red scare" while mostly a bunch of nonsense, was actually based on some kernels of truth.   There were Soviet spies in the USA.

I remember my hippie brother denouncing the USA as vile and corrupt for executing Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who of course were completely innocent because he read a book about it and went to college.   I wonder who wrote that book?   It turns out, they were in fact spies, and gave the H-bomb to the Soviets.

But he was convinced - and still is - that our country is vile and corrupt and the worst on the planet.   He is a useful idiot of the first order.   I would suggest he try protesting in Russia.  Oh, right, he's been there - twice - to put on his little "we hate America" puppet shows.   The Soviets loved him.  And like I said before, he cried when the Berlin wall fell, for all the wrong reasons.

People like that are easy to manipulate.   And yes, foreign countries use people like that, for their own ends and means.

So yes, this shit happens.  To what extent, we may never know.  Recent events, however, show us how extensive such "influence" can be.