RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/i-thought-i-was-smarter-than-almost-everybody-my-double-life-as-a-kgb-agent?utm_source=pocket-newtab

On a chilly morning in December 1988, computer analyst Jack Barsky embarked on his usual morning commute to his office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, leaving his wife and baby daughter at home in Queens. As he entered the subway, he caught sight of something startling: a daub of red paint on a metal beam. Barsky had looked for it every morning for years; it meant he had a life-changing decision to make, and fast.

Barsky knew the drill. The red paint was a warning that he was in immediate danger, that he should hurry to collect cash and emergency documents from a prearranged drop site. From there, he would cross the border into Canada and contact the Soviet consulate in Toronto. Arrangements would be made for him to leave the country. He would cease to be Jack Barsky. The American identity he had inhabited for a decade would evaporate and he would return to his former life: that of Albrecht Dittrich, a chemist and KGB agent, with a wife and seven-year-old son waiting patiently for him in East Germany.

Barsky thought of his American daughter, Chelsea: could he really leave her? And, if he didn’t, how long could he evade both the KGB and US counterintelligence?

***

On an unseasonably warm afternoon in January 2017, Barsky strides into my hotel in Atlanta, Georgia and gives me a firm handshake. At 67, he has lived a more or less ordinary life for the past three decades. But the years spent undercover were hard on him and the people close to him. Only recently has he been able to come clean about his past. His late coming out has provided an overwhelming sense of release, Barsky says. “All those years, I had a little man up here,” he says, pointing to the sandy hair swept across his scalp in a side parting. “He would constantly watch what I was saying, and stop me from going into certain territory. And then the little man got killed off, and it was like an explosion.” These days, he is a garrulous conversationalist who requires little prodding.

Barsky’s story is a timely reminder of the immense resources the Russians were willing to expend during the cold war in their bid to embed agents in enemy territory. Hacking was not an option, and casual travel between Moscow and the west was much harder. “As I’m talking about this stuff, it feels unreal,” he says of his convoluted journey from East Germany to the US. “It feels as if it wasn’t me. But it was.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/victoria-woodhull-first-woman-presidential-candidate/

S he was the first woman to run for president, the first to address a congressional committee, and the first to own a brokerage on Wall Street. She was also a con artist, a gold digger, and a scandal magnet. When she ran for president in 1872, she sat out Election Day in a Manhattan jail, arrested on charges of obscenity. Victoria Woodhull was unquestionably a pioneer in women’s rights, yet her legacy is so messy and complicated that she remains an outlier in feminist history.

She was born Victoria Claflin in 1838, into a squalidly poor family in Homer, Ohio, a tiny frontier hamlet. Her sister Tennessee (called Tennie C or just Tennie) came along seven years later, and a third sister, Utica, after her. In all there were ten Claflin kids, seven of whom survived into adulthood.

Their father, Buck Claflin, was a con man who sold patent medicine as “the King of Cancers.” Their mother, Roxana, was an Evangelical Christian who spoke in tongues and ranted fire and brimstone at the neighbors. Victoria and Tennessee were still children when Buck had them out performing as spirit mediums and faith healers. Victoria was a dark, ethereal beauty, and almost spookily serious. She would claim to have visions of Jesus and Satan, and to receive advice from spirit guides who included Demosthenes, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Juliet. Utica and Tennie were simpler types. Utica became an alcoholic and drug addict. Tennie was blonde, bubbly, and carnal. All three would use sex to get what they needed from men. But with Victoria everything had to be taken to a higher level. She didn’t just want men to desire her and give her money; she wanted them to admire, respect, and even adore her. She’d say or do almost anything to get that from them, and she was good at it. Men didn’t just fall in love with her, they fell in worship of her.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/lessons-from-the-united-states-showdown-with-the-barbary-pirates/

Jefferson’s example in dealing with the pirates supports the Soleimani strike.

As a fan of The Editors podcast, my ears perked up in the last episode’s tussle between Rich Lowry and Charlie Cooke over the U.S. strike that killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. I had argued on NRO last week that President Trump had authority, under the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force, to kill Soleimani, who not only was responsible for a series of attacks on American forces but was in the middle of planning more to come. Even if a critic, such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, believed that killing fell outside those past acts, I argued that the Constitution gave the president the power as commander in chief and chief executive to use force without the need for congressional permission beforehand in the event that a foreign nation had already attacked U.S. forces.

Rich, I was pleased to hear, shared that view. It is the same understanding held by Republican presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes, as well as Democrats — until Obama. But Charlie, to my shock and dismay, disagreed. He argued that Congress’s power to declare war required that it authorize any uses of force abroad. Rich appealed to Charlie’s English respect for tradition by citing Thomas Jefferson’s attacks on the Barbary pirates as a precedent. Charlie responded that the Jefferson example did not support the Trump strike.

As someone who started his career as a law professor writing on war powers, and followed with a book on presidential power, I can’t resist the opportunity to come in on Rich’s side on the Barbary pirates question. While the precedent does not stand as clearly as other examples for the president’s commander-in-chief authority to use force without a congressional declaration of war, it comes very close. And when examined closely, it easily would support President Trump’s strike on General Soleimani with or without the AUMF.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/founders-feared-tyranny-more-partisan-rancor-bruce-thornton/

Maybe it’s the Christmas season, or maybe it’s the grotesquely rabid partisanship of the Democrat impeachment follies, but we’re hearing a lot of moaning and groaning about “partisan rancor” and what a threat it is to our “democracy.” But tyranny, not “partisan rancor,” is what we should fear, for freedom is the foundational good that our government was designed to protect.

An example of this misunderstanding about partisanship can be found in some comments by a very smart political analyst. He writes that the “partisan bitterness that is dividing us into two warring camps . . . is the greatest threat American democracy faces today. Democracy cannot exist when a country is divided into two camps, each of which sees the other as an enemy rather than an adversary. Democracy relies on the suspension of partisan rancor in the interest of the nation.”

First, this common claim that we are at a moment of unprecedented partisan division ignores a lot of history. What about the Civil War and the decades leading up to it? We were divided into two literally “warring camps,” and that divide culminated in over 700,000 dead Americans. Yet our democratic republic not only survived, but became a world power, which was made possible in part by the lancing of the moral infection of slavery, and the confirmation that the union could not be broken into vulnerable sections and become easy prey for foreign powers.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/recalling-the-battle-of-the-bulge/

Seventy-five years ago, at the Battle of the Bulge (fought from Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945), the United States suffered more casualties than in any other battle in its history. Some 19,000 Americans were killed, 47,500 wounded and 23,000 reported missing.

The American and British armies were completely surprised by a last-gasp German offensive, given that Allied forces were near the Rhine River and ready to cross into Germany to finish off a crippled Third Reich.

The Americans had been exhausted by a rapid 300-mile summer advance to free much of France and Belgium. In their complacence, they oddly did not worry much about their thinning lines, often green replacement troops or the still-formidable Germany army. After all, Nazi Germany was being battered on all sides by Americans, British, Canadians and Russians. Its cities were in ruins from heavy bombers.

Yet the losing side is often the most dangerous just before its collapse.

In retreat, the Germans were shortening their interior lines. They had the element of surprise, given confident allies who assumed the war would soon be over.

The cold December weather would ground the overwhelming number of Allied fighters and bombers. The Germans aimed their assault through the snowy roads of the Ardennes Mountains to bowl over inexperienced or exhausted U.S. divisions.