Active Shooter Mandalay Bay

H

holdover

.475 A&M Magnum
Messages
16,931
Reaction score
25,062
Location
occupied NY
Here is a ""secret""conspiracy by the CIA to rescue people in Iran . It gives insight into how conspiracy's from the CIA are conducted. This is from the CIA's own website. If an intelligence agency were to conduct operations in the US they would be using similar tactics.


A relative "moderate"--Abulhassan Bani-Sadr--was about to be elected President of Iran, and we judged it possible that he could be sold on these economic points and then might be able to gain agreement from the radical factions of the regime. If so, the cover for infiltrating the Delta Force (in preparation for a hostage rescue attempt at the Embassy) as a team of movie set construction workers and camera crews to prepare the set was a natural. We imagined that it might be possible to conceal weapons and other material in the motion picture equipment.

[Top of page]


Forming a Film Company
One weekend in early January, between trips to Ottawa and planning sessions with NE Division, I made a quick visit to California. I brought along $10,000 in cash, the first of several black-bag deliveries of funds to set up our motion picture company. I arrived on Friday night and met with Jerome and one of his associates in a suite of production offices they had reserved for our purposes on the old Columbia Studio lot in Hollywood. I had invited a CIA contracts officer to the meeting to act as witness to the cash delivery and to follow up as bagman and auditor for the run of the operation. It would take two years to clear all accounts on these matters.

Our production company, "Studio Six Productions," was created in four days, including a weekend, in mid-January. Our offices had previously been occupied by Michael Douglas, who had just completed producing The China Syndrome.

Jerome and his associate were masters at working the Hollywood system. They had begun applying "grease" and calling in favors even before I arrived. Simple things such as the installation of telephones were supposed to take weeks, but we had everything we needed down to the paper clips by the fourth day.

We arranged for full-page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, the two trade papers most important to any business publicity campaign. We tried to keep Jerome's well-known name hidden, but the "trades" had their reporters hot on our trail, and the word was out that something big was brewing in the industry.

When the press discovered that Jerome was connected with this independent production company, interest mounted and more press play followed. Our efforts to keep Jerome's involvement secret actually added credibility to our putative film-making company. Hollywood, moreover, was an ideal place to create and dismantle a major cover entity overnight. The Mafia and many shady foreign investors were notorious for backing productions in Hollywood, where fortunes are frequently made and lost. It is also an ideal place to launder money.

[Top of page]


Picking a Script
Once Studio Six Productions was set up, we tackled the problem of identifying an appropriate script. Jerome and I sat around his kitchen table discussing what the theme should be. Because Star Wars had made it big only recently, many science-fiction, fantasy, and superhero films were being produced. We decided we needed a script with "sci-fi," Middle Eastern, and mythological elements. Something about the glory of Islam would be nice, too. Jerome recalled a recent script that might serve our purpose, and he hauled it out of a pile of manuscripts submitted for his consideration.



This script fit our purpose beautifully, particularly because no uninitiated person could decipher its complicated story line. The script was based on an award-winning sci-fi novel. The producers had also envisioned building a huge set that would later become a major theme park. They had hired a famous comic-strip artist to prepare concepts for the sets. This gave us some good "eyewash" to add to a production portfolio.

We decided to repackage our borrowed script by decorating it with the appropriate logo and title markings. The only copy of the script we needed would be carried by me as a prop to be shown to the Iranians in my role as production manager--and only in the event we were questioned at the airport in Tehran.

[Top of page]


Argo
Jerome and I then set about picking a name for our movie. We needed something catchy from Eastern culture or mythology. After several tries, we hit on it! During our 10-year association, he had proven to be a great story and joke teller. He once told a group of us a profane "knock-knock" joke, with the word "Argo" in the punch line.

This word became an in-house disguise-team recognition signal and battle cry. We used it to break the tension that often built up when we were working long hours under difficult circumstances preparing for an important operation. Jerome remembered this. He also recalled that the name stemmed from mythology. He looked up the definition of Argo and confirmed it as the name of the ship on which Jason and the Argonauts sailed to rescue the Golden Fleece from the many-headed dragon holding it captive in the sacred garden. Perfect! This precisely described the situation in Iran.

I quickly designed an "Argo" logo, which we used for full-page ads in the trades. The ads proclaimed that "Studio Six Productions Presents 'Argo'... A cosmic conflagration ... story by Teresa Harris." (Teresa Harris was the alias we selected for our story consultant; it would be used by one of the six awaiting our arrival in Tehran.)

[Top of page]


Calling the Iranian Consulate
On my last day in California, I made our first business call from our studio offices to the Iranian Consulate in San Francisco, using my alias. I said I required a visa and instructions on procedures for obtaining permission to scout a shooting location in Tehran. My party of eight would be made up of six Canadians, a European, and a Latin American.

The Latin American would be an OTS authentication officer, "Julio," who was posted in Europe. His languages were Spanish, French, and Arabic, and he had considerable exfiltration experience. We had selected OTS-produced documentation for his cover legend as an associate producer representing our production company's ostensible South American backers. I would travel on an OTS-produced European passport.

The call to the Iranian Consulate was a washout. Officials there suggested that we apply at the nearest Iranian Consulate in our area. This was not surprising because many Iranian diplomats were carried over from the Shah's regime, and most were unsure of their current status and their visa-granting authorities.

I departed on the "red-eye special" that night with all the trappings of a Hollywood type, including matchbooks from the Brown Derby Restaurant, where Studio Six Productions held a farewell dinner for me.

[Top of page]


Final Technical Preparations
Back in Washington, the various efforts being mounted against Iran were still going full tilt. Our operations plan for the rescue of the six was being implemented at the working levels of OTS and NE Division, but it had not yet been coordinated with or approved by policymakers.

My immediate task was to participate in the final technical preparations for our three cover options. I had collected several exemplars of supporting documentation for our production party that were to be reproduced by the OTS graphics specialists to pad the wallets of our party. The script had to be altered and a presentation portfolio prepared for our production manager.

Joe Missouri, the document specialist who had accompanied me on the initial trip to Ottawa, had remained behind at that time to negotiate for ancillary documentation to support the Canadian part of the legend. This had required special authorization from senior levels of the Canadian Government, which Missouri managed to obtain. This was quite an accomplishment for a young officer.

By this time, Joe had returned to Washington and taken charge of the Argo portfolio. Joe had always been an artist at the typewriter. He took the roles of various members of the production party and fleshed them out in the form of resumes. This clever ploy provided briefing papers for each subject that could be carried in the open in the production manager's portfolio. When completed, this portfolio had everything needed to sell even the most sophisticated investment banker on our movie.



A Classic Case of Deception — Central Intelligence Agency
 
H

holdover

.475 A&M Magnum
Messages
16,931
Reaction score
25,062
Location
occupied NY
Elegant Writing in the Clandestine Services — Central Intelligence Agency

Elegant Writing in the Clandestine Services
APPROVED FOR RELEASE
CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM
22 SEPT 93



Anyway, in that conversation, the Senior Officer appointed me Official Word Watcher for the Division, by I don't know what authority, and charged me with the following duties:

To collect from all CS communications outstanding examples of elegant writing, and to report upon my research at opportune times so that our writers may be edified and instructed thereby.

As soon as my appointment became known, I had a great deal of help 'from other headquarters personnel, but I will acknowledge that help specifically only if the danger of lynching becomes clear, and I need help (or company).

Here, then, is my first report. I should like to begin it by listing some of the most elegant words we have in our correspondence, words which I urge one and all to use at every opportunity. I should like to see the day when not a single page of our prose escapes the use of at least one of these words. I especially urge our writers to try new uses for all these words, and not be bound by such things as tense, gender, number or mode. Caveat, for example, is in the Latin imperative mode, but that is much too restrictive, and we have quite properly used this word as a noun for some time now. Imagine my delight when I observed recently the first attempt that I know of to use it, as is, in the present indicative. When you consider that we have long since expanded its original sense of "warning" to include the sense of "conditions" or "provisos," you can understand why the word is so important to us. I can right here remark that I should caveat some of the remarks I am about to make in this essay, and you will not have the slightest idea what I mean, but it sounds distinguished and important, and that is what matters.

Here is the list:

caveat
rationale
thrust
interface (used as a noun and a verb)
dichotomy
lacuna*
forthcoming (in the sense of "candid")
profile (can be either high or low)
silhouette (can be either high or low)
options
life-style
posture
rapport

Rapport is an especially fine word, but so far we have used it only as a noun. Perhaps we should offer a prize to the officer who first devises a successful sentence using rapport as a verb, although we may have been beaten to the punch on this one by the folk-rock expression "to rap." Even employing "rapport" as a noun, nevertheless, we can do great things. Note the following excerpt from a field report:

"We hope it does not reach the extreme where the agent fails to establish a working rapport, or worse, and thus destroys ..."

The mind boggles at the thought of anything being worse than a working rapport, and yet here is an officer who does not want the agent to fail to establish exactly that. Like the character in the play who suddenly discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life, this writer is probably unaware that he has constructed a litotes there. A litotes affirms something by denying the contrary, as in "he is not without charm." The device can also be stretched to refute something by negating the denial of the contrary, as in "he denied that he was not unwilling to go," ... and so on, into total opacity. It is one way to make a reader really study your prose, Still with me?

Try this one:

"Subject: Refutal of rumors regarding a coup."

To take words from other languages or disciplines, and use them in new and clever ways to confound the pedestrian mind, is a noble thing, but how much more magnificent it is to take a legitimate word from our own language and by the change of one phoneme devise a new word, which nobody ever heard of before, but whose meaning everybody will immediately perceive! The roots of this particular treasure seem to be in the words refuse and refute, but I noted that the inventor did not arrange a reciprocal loan of suffixes and speak of such things as "Hanoi's refusation to make peace." There is something not quite right about that one. Sort of low class, perhaps. It is possible, of course, that the word rebut was bobbing around in the crucible which produced refutal, but in that direction lies paranoia, and we will venture no farther.

It seems to me that refutal deserves at least as high a place in our lexicon as normalcy, which, as you may know, was invented by Warren G. I-larding, who didn't realize he was inventing anything. He would have made a good operations officer. Indeed, I think that the authenticity of these inventions has to be based to a great extent upon the fact that when they are first uttered their inventors are unconscious of bringing something new into the world.

I don't know whether the innocence of the inventors has any bearing on the acceptability of words to modern dictionaries. I doubt it. Modern dictionaries will accept anything anybody says, because if somebody says something it becomes usage, and usage is king! There is one grumpy headquarters officer who dislikes this modern trend, and says that the Oxford of 1912 is the only authoritative dictionary of the English language. He is a troublemaker, who will one day be dealt with by Division Authorities. He is the one who brought to me the following:

"Subject: Easement of the Threat of a Coup."

I had to point out to him that Webster's New World Dictionary says there is such a meaning to easement, in addition to the legal use pertaining to land titles, so that settles that. He also has to accept the fact, for instance, that chaise longue has now become chaise lounge in this country, by authority of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and that lingerie means ladies' drawers and shifts and things of that, nature, and if he and the French don't like it then they can damn well lump it.

What should we do about the shall/will problem? My own inclination is to let it lie, because the shall/will rule was an artificial thing, anyway, set up in a very elegant epoch of the English language, to tone up the speech of His Majesty's subjects. 7t is a difficult thing to master, and I think we are doing well enough without it, although you have to admit that nothing dresses up a sentence quite so much as an unexpected "shall" where a "will" really belongs. That is to say that we should pay no attention to the rule, but should just put in a shall at any time a. sentence needs to be toned up a bit.

Another problem which I'm inclined to de-emphasize is the one which the New Yorker calls "The Omnipotent Whom." There is no doubt about it, whom sounds much more literate and polished than plain old everyday who, but I think we have this factor under good control. In fact, I have ceased collecting samples, after nearly filling a notebook, because everyone is doing so well. I shall cite just two fairly typical examples:

"ZPDRUM, whom we note is currently in Paris ..."
"Forward the document to whomever may have an interest in the matter."

If there is anything that dresses up our prose even more than the shall/will or who/whom pilasters, it is the mixed metaphor. If your metaphor gives a clear picture, you should be ashamed of yourself. We don't do as well as we should on metaphors, in fact, and we must work on them a bit harder. We have much to learn from the State Department in this respect, as witness the following sample from State traffic:

"If the government of Graustark does not box itself in by wrapping the national flag around the training area ..."

Try to construct a mental picture from the Ozymandian blueprint, and despair! The same State Department expert also spoke of "a certain rustling of sabers," which shows that he is made of championship material. I would quarrel mildly in one sense, however. If the sabers are, in truth, made of something that rustles, he should correct and extend his borrowing from Poe, and make the rustling uncertain, as well as sad, and perhaps silken. Unless, of course, the writer meant to imply that there was a kind of military Bad Bart who was going around stealing great numbers of sabers from the corrals of nice folks in white hats.

But a fig for the State Department! We have our own experts, and I defy- any other agency to produce anything to equal the following:

"The result of the medical checkup was that the agent has diabetes."
"His bank allotee is forwarded under separate cover."
"The negative reaction to this device was its (attaboy!) lack of sufficient range. It was tested singularly and in pairs."
"He is not temperamentally geared to write in subtilities, but does produce good hardhitting yellow journalism in the style of a poor man's Westbrook Pegler."

The last sentence may be one of the best of the decade. I don't say that because of his reference to "hardhitting" journalism, either, even though that term does limn a picture of an energetic, up-and-at-'em CIA officer playing Wagnerian themes on the mighty Wurlitzer he has constructed from his local (sob) stable of assets. It's good, but you can't give very high marks for it, because when you come right down to. it, our operations have never to my knowledge produced a single paragraph that wasn't hardhitting. Where that sentence achieves greatness is in calling attention to one of the characteristics of the late columnist which has been too long overlooked — that is, the fact that only the rich could afford the real Westbrook Pegler.

But there is more. If one lifts the phrase "temperamentally geared" out of the stream and contemplates it carefully, one cannot help but be impressed with the subtility of the thing. I know a number of people in this agency who I think are temperamentally geared. I steer clear of them. They can't do you any good.

"In view of the serious flap potential, which, if discovered by the host government, could have lead to a worsening of relations ..."

We need not dwell upon the construction which hypothesizes the damage that might be done if the government discovers the flap potential of an operation. We all know that, surely. Who among us would ever want a host government to find out how risky an operation he was mounting? We must always keep our host government reassured that our clandestine operations in their countries have also no flap potential at all. But let us press on to the rest of that sentence, whose enigmatic wording led my mind into an almost psychedelic whirl, with images of "some lead is red, and some reds are led," and when the machinery finally clanked to a halt, here is what came out of the printer:



You can have that, if you want it.

Perhaps there is something about lead that attracts the man-Freudian associations with bullets or poison or pollution. It would not be the first time our prose implied more than it said. Notice the gothic scene evoked by the following:

"... we will continue to keep this asset tabled, and will call on him for spot reporting when necessary."

If all our Operations Officers were as skilled at writing as this man, the Green Beret case would never have hit the headlines. There is no "terminated with extreme prejudice" blooper here to provoke the news media into soaring flights of fancy. No, the untutored mind would receive that sentence as meaning that the matter was being held in abeyance, as in the parliamentary term "to table a motion," whereas those of us in the know immediately perceive that this officer is describing a bit of standard tradecraft, whereby we strap a man to a deal table and belabor him with interfaces and rapports and dichotomies until he by god comes up with a spot report.

"So successful was Fulano's re-immergence as a crusading journalist that ..."

A number of our stations have in the past produced or supported underground newspapers, but this must be the first one of record whose clandestine journalism was done under water. Eat your heart out, MI-6!

"Fulano appears to be in excellent financial straits." "Subject and his wife, Josephine, nee unknown ..."
"He did it in a fit of peak."*
"He easily looses his head."
"He attempted to illicit the information."
"The rightist candidate, who won a pleurality of votes.
"The agent demonstrated an excellent operational posture."*
... like operating in a vacuum tube."
"The national liveration movement ...'
"Incendiary fires will be set."
"Several methods of modus operandi are being contemplated."

The author of that last sentence could have added immeasurably to its charm by pointing out that incendiary fires can be put out with wet. water; but he did at least clarify things a bit the following week by explaining "By large incendiary fires, the agent may be referring to one of the petroleum storage areas ..."

One of the prize words in my collection is the invention of a State Department officer, whom we really ought to try to identify and recruit. The word is fragile and beautiful, and it is with some hesitation that I offer it up on our rather brutal altar, for I fear that we will over-use it and cause it to wilt and fade before its time. I have no right to keep it, however, and present it herewith with a fervent exhortation to one and all to use it tenderly so that it will last for at least six months to a year. Here it is:

dichotomization






Footnotes
*Author's Note: In this essay, examples of elegant writing have been taken from official CS communications. The names of originating stations and officers, as well as cryptonyms and other indicators, have been changed to protect the guilty.


* The OK operational posture for 1970-72, in case you didn't know, is forward-leaning. We have in the past been through postures of defense, agonizing re-appraisal, benevolent neutrality and the like, but then came that luminous moment when an unknown genius suggested that we should all be forward-leaning. Thousands of our patriotic, conscientious headquarters staff members were thereupon transformed into human gnomons, who can be observed every morning shortly before 8:30, inclined dutifully in the direction of Langley, and at about 5:00 p.m. pointed just as dutifully toward home
 
Automan21

Automan21

.44 mag
Messages
783
Reaction score
482
Location
NYC
holdover said:
They pretty much covered everything here, bump fire stocks , high end optics, tannerite ar 15, silencers,30 round mags, , cap guns, paint ball rifles squirt guns , slingshots spitballs little toy soldiers with rifles ( the one on the radio is OK), paperclips rubber bands objects that can be made to look like guns , the word gun rifle firearm.
Click to expand...

They even took out the gun icon on smart phone texts. Next thing you know you can't make the gun symbol with your hand.
 
Robin

Robin

.577 Tyrannosaur.
Messages
20,710
Reaction score
44,915
Location
Livingston County
10-year-old suspended over finger gun - CNN
"Pop Tart" suspension should be upheld, school official says - CBS News
7-Year-Old Boy Reportedly Suspended for Making ‘Gun’ Out of School Pastry
8-Year-Old Florida Boy Suspended for Making Gun Shape With Fingers: ‘It Was a Game’
10-year-old suspended for making gun with finger
Ionia kindergartner suspended for making gun with hand
Boy, 6, Suspended For Making Gun Gesture with Hand | Free Range Kids
There is a war for the minds of our children.
Robin
 
Defilade

Defilade

.700 Nitro Express
Messages
26,685
Reaction score
38,343
Location
Elsewhere
livingston said:
Another shooting in which we have more questions than answers ...
Click to expand...

Amazing what a gag order will suppress right? Read this OLD article about what a casino insider says about the amount of camera footage is in these Casinos. Yet we have to listen to some sheriff and FBI agents explaining how everything went down. Lets see the HOURS of actual footage!!!

A casino like the Bellagio probably has 2,000 cameras connected to 50 monitors, with just a few people watching live surveillance, Jonas said. But the information is there to be scrutinized when casinos notice players winning unusually large amounts of money.
Click to expand...

Casino insider tells (almost) all about security
 
L

livingston

20×102mm Vulcan
Messages
51,129
Reaction score
139,188
Location
livingston county
Las Vegas shooter's laptop missing its hard drive
A laptop computer recovered from the Las Vegas hotel room where Stephen Paddock launched the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was missing its hard drive, depriving investigators of a potential key source of information on why he killed and maimed so many people, ABC News has learned.

Interested in Las Vegas Shooting?
Add Las Vegas Shooting as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Las Vegas Shooting news, video, and analysis from ABC News.
Las Vegas Shooting
Add Interest
Paddock is believed to have removed the hard drive before fatally shooting himself, and the missing device has not yet been recovered, sources told ABC News.

Investigators digging into Paddock’s background also learned he purchased software designed to erase files from a hard drive, but without the hard drive to examine it is impossible to know if he ever used the software, one source said.
more at ...
Las Vegas shooter's laptop missing its hard drive
 
L

livingston

20×102mm Vulcan
Messages
51,129
Reaction score
139,188
Location
livingston county
Paddock was taken into custody at an assisted living center in North Hollywood
The arrest came after an investigation that began months before the Las Vegas shooting, after authorities received a tip Paddock had child porn on his computer, FOX 11 reported.

Authorities said no one knew where Paddock was living until another tip came in, leading police to the North Hollywood facility, law enforcement sources told FOX 11. Police said Paddock was squatting in the facility and was evicted, leading officers to finding the material.

Brother was worth millions Had many homes and brother was squatting .....In other words homeless. So in their investigation months ago (perhaps with the FBI ) They had to know a bit about the future killer ? Perhaps even interviewed him .. Perhaps took his hard drive ?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top