Right then. We now enter the book’s second section: Blame.
[The office of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency could belong to a business executive or doctor or an everyday, small-town high school principal. There are the usual collection of reference books on the shelf, degrees and photos on the wall, and, on his desk, an autographed baseball from Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench. Bob Archer, my host, can see by my face that I was expecting something different. I suspect that is why he chose to conduct our interview here.]

I don’t know if it’s too much fiction or a general hatred of authority, but guy looks nothing like I expect + seems like he’s deliberately going for that impression + presentation is “small town high school principal” = fake to me. Does he actually care about baseball, or did he just use his fat salary to buy one because it’s the sort of thing that makes you seem human when you’re actually a freaky CIAbot?

When you think about the CIA, you probably imagine two of our most popular and enduring myths. The first is that our mission is to search the globe for any conceivable threat to the United States, and the second is that we have the power to perform the first.
…
“Hey, did you hear who killed so and so, I hear it was the CIA. Hey, what about that coup in El Banana Republico, must have been the CIA
…
This is the image most people had of us before the war, and it’s an image we were more than happy to encourage. We wanted bad guys to suspect us, to fear us and maybe think twice before trying to harm any of our citizens. This was the advantage of our image as some kind of omniscient octopus. The only disadvantage was that our own people believed in that image as well

Apparently this version of the CIA only ever tried to trick people abroad! Any at home tricking was a sad accident.

ALSO THEY TOTALLY DID NOT MURDER PEOPLE OVER BANANAS THEY SWEAR.

Even during the blank check days of the cold war, it’s just not physically possible to have eyes and ears in every backroom, cave, alley, brothel, bunker, office, home, car, and rice paddy across the entire planet.

I hear Russia did pretty well at that, actually. Step one: bug all those places. All the places.

We have very real limitations and extremely finite assets, so why would we waste those assets chasing down each and every potential threat?

Aw, sounds like someone’s jealous of Israel and their infinite resources to chase down not only potential threats but even invented ones!

How did the contradiction not blow the author’s head up, I don’t know. Or maybe I’m misreading this as an attempt to show off how smart he is for knowing the CIA isn’t behind everything and instead he’s saying the CIA is a bunch of bungling fools who should’ve outsourced everything to Israel.

Anyway, he goes on to outline that no, you can’t actually chase every possible threat and even if you know there’s multiple confirmed threats you have to prioritize based on which is more imminent.

He goes on to say China actually hid the plague really well, so maybe the moral really is that America just sucks. Basically, all they said was, “Yo we’re murdering dissidents here!” and everyone had a good laugh and said, “That’s our China!” Also, CIA you are fucking morons the disappearance patterns should’ve looked completely different. I mean, yeah, China loves arresting people, but dissident roundups and annihilating entire villages in the middle of nowhere do not look alike. They should’ve blamed it on chemicals or something. “Oops we forgot to regulate milk again, village died.” “Hahaha, that’s our China!” When people wonder why there’s no survivors at all, you have a ready made excuse – you totally rounded up the survivors to try to prevent the story from leaking to the media. But it got out somehow anyway, boy we’re just so incompetent compared to you guys huh?

But they apparently did engineer an awful lot, which is nice.

the whole Taiwan Strait incident: the victory of the Taiwan National Independence Party, the assassination of the PRC defense minister, the buildup, the war threats, the demonstrations and subsequent crackdowns were all engineered by the Ministry of State Security

I’d add that this is the same thing the CIA actually does, but I think this is fluffy CIA who never ever infiltrated environmentalist groups so they could turn them into terrorist cells that would then justify cracking down on environmentalist groups.

Also, apparently he admits the CIA of the time was in trouble because of

the purges…
You mean the reforms?
No, I mean the purges, because that’s what they were. When Joe Stalin either shot or imprisoned his best military commanders, he wasn’t doing half as much damage to his national security as what that administration did to us with their “reforms.”

And by “purges” he means people quitting to get better jobs in the private sector because they were sick of politicians blaming them for the “brushfire wars”, which is how this book will avoid talking about Iraq. You can understand how that’s very like mass killing under Stalin.

He then says he didn’t know what was going on, but admits he started to get suspicious at some point, but everyone knew bringing it up would be career suicide because ??? but finally he did and got transferred for his trouble.

He then explains what happened to that super special anti-zombie report

the copy that was originally hand delivered by Paul Knight himself, the one marked “Eyes Only” for the director…it was found at the bottom of the desk of a clerk in the San Antonio field office of the FBI, three years after the Great Panic.

As you may be gathering this is not a part of the book I like. It’s incredibly hamhanded. I’ve already outlined how the basic structure of the zombie outbreak doesn’t make sense, which means it seems extra stupid how everyone acts. Also, the way he structures the mistakes is really annoying. Here, the big problem is that it’s all or nothing – you’re either genius, like China and Israel, or morons, like America, with no in-between.

Also also fluffy CIA fuck you CIA. If there were zombies it’d probably be your fault.

We end with him saying the report getting lost doesn’t matter much because Israel went public with their anti-zombie stance, but still no one listened because no one could figure out the innovative information-spreading method of aiming a goddamn camera.