The Political Animal

I recently read the book “Inside the Aquarium” by Viktor Suvorov, a Russian GRU agent during the height of the Cold War. It details his recruitment, training (The Aquarium was the euphemism for GRU’s academy, reflecting its insularity) and ultimate defection to England. His account is consistent with the modern intelligence community being structured as secret societies ever have been, with a possible exception of substituting Pavlovian-scientific methods for the occultism of Aristotle and Plato.

Suvorov’s tale began as a tank battalion commander. His unit was activated on an emergency basis to counter Western aggression, although he quickly recognized it as a drill by the presence of observers. His unit’s deployment was blocked by a malfunctioning heavy truck. Instead of waiting for the truck to be cleared, he ordered his tank to ram through a brick wall alongside the road to clear a path. He rationalized the destruction of property afterward with “it’s probably already been rebuilt” and “this alert could have been real!” knowing at the time it wasn’t.

He was quickly seconded to military intelligence, where his recruiter watched him for several years and put him through the ardors of Spetsnaz training. At one time, he remarked that Suvorov would have made a good criminal, as a compliment. After being tested with deniable orders to commit various terrorist acts, some of which were real, his handler sent him to the Aquarium.

The first thing they did was show Suvorov a video of a GRU agent being cremated alive as punishment for disloyalty. He was then given a minute to reconsider joining. He didn’t even hesitate, the alternative being the predictable, limited career of a tanker officer. The parallel to Freemasonry’s death oaths of enlistment as the price of joining an elite fraternity of insiders was unmistakable.

After many years of cutthroat competition in the diplomatic service… only the most politically trusted agents of the Soviet Union were permitted abroad, especially if like Suvorov, they had no families to hold hostage… the #2 GRU man at the embassy became politically suspect. His peers quickly shunned him, what we Americans would call Canceling in the context of our academic Marxism, except Suvorov decided to show him kindness. No political help, of course, but they went drinking together… Suvorov gave him a ride home after he lost transportation privileges… small kindnesses that make a world of difference to anybody going through life’s low points.

Incredibly, #2 was politically rehabilitated! Very unusual to survive Soviet suspicion. #2 was back in style and remembered who his friends & allies were. Suvorov’s future looked bright!

Later on a stakeout of an alleyway notorious for clandestine meetings, Suvorov was shocked when instead of his target, #2 arrived to drop off a Western prostitute. Using non-approved whores on the down low is one of the worst security breaches possible in the espionage world. Honeytraps and pillow-talk date back to Adam & Eve!

Was it a loyalty test? he wondered. Such tests were routine, especially between perceived friends, because Party loyalty was the only loyalty the Party allowed. But if he wasn’t being tested, then Suvorov would be denouncing a friend and benefactor… but he had to anyway, because compromised. The only happy ending was to denounce his friend and find out it was a test.

Suvorov denounced his friend and found out it was NOT a test.

Easy guess what happened next: damage control. GRU Moscow began investigating everything and everybody #2 had touched. A few days after #2 was disappeared, Suvorov noticed he was being followed home by a Soviet diplomat. He knew what that meant. Russian intelligence once did a scientific study on the best time & location to kidnap a man for minimal resistance. 4am out of the man’s bed. At which time, Suvorov would disappear into The System just like his friend, who had probably been tortured into denouncing him.

Suvorov went home to his seventh-floor apartment, opened the window and… couldn’t force himself to jump. Maybe he was mistaken. He didn’t know. They had nothing on him; there was nothing to have; he’d always been loyal. He had to be sure. He closed the window, went through his evening routine and laid down in bed. After midnight, he quietly rose, dressed in the dark, snuck out of the apartment building and watched from a safe distance.

At 4am, the light in his bedroom window turned on.

He defected immediately. Spies have an acronym for motivation, MICE. Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego. Suvorov’s reason for defecting was Coercion: innocence did not protect him. Arguably, he denounced himself.

What a self-defeating level of paranoid suspicion that was. Suvorov would never have defected had his superiors demanded more proof than a friendship and forced confession. #2 might not have solicited local prostitutes if he’d had his wife along. (Families were often kept within USSR to discourage defection.)

When you think about it, turning friends against each other for a test of Party loyalty is self-defeating. Many men will serve an evil master if along the way, they can have friends, family and the feeling they’re accomplishing something useful with their lives. In contrast, Suvorov documented how the GRU cipher clerks at the embassy were once allowed to live like anybody else, until one of them defected for whatever reason. Afterwards, all clerks were put under such heavy guard that many of them were confined to five rooms of the embassy: bedroom, bathroom, office, boss’ office and the hallway in between, for years, until they begged to be told stories of the outside world. Even when they lived inside Russia, a small village outside Moscow was quietly reserved for GRU clerks and they were not allowed to live anywhere else.

That’s not what loyalty looks like. The GRU’s own policies made disloyalty a constant threat. They weren’t stupid men; they had to have known they were tearing apart the lives of their own people, then punishing them when they broke. If the purpose of a system is its product, the GRU was the same as every other secret society in existence, twisting men into political animals good only for obeying secret instructions from unseen masters. GRU also compensated for such abuse in the usual occult-society ways: by screening for low-conscience, thrill-seeking recruits, offering bribes in between the threats and maintaining a rivalry against the KGB that sounded more like a False Dilemma than an accidental duplication of spy agency authority that nobody ever got around to correcting.

Sounds familiar.

We Americans are being conditioned into political animals in similar fashion. No families or friends. No vacations or holidays. Everything is being politicized from our medicine to our mechanic, not by our choice, but the pressure is there regardless. Pressure to pick a faction, be assigned to a handler and go down the political purity spiral that eventually pumps out a human animal without its soul. The only wrinkle is that this time, the entirety of society is intended to be so twisted, not only the most useful and/or pliable of society.

I see it happening among pundits of every flavor. “Donald Trump yelled at Bibi during a phone call! Finally, America has broken free of Israeli influence!” “JD Vance is a Christian hero because he published a book on joining Catholicism! Ghost-written autobiographies don’t lie!” “Tucker Carlson’s dad might have been a career media pimp for the CIA, but Tucker is only popular today because he speaks for us! We can trust him to be disloyal against his father!” “I was blind but Charlie Kirk’s death made me see!” They’ve picked their handlers and are cheering for “my team, right or wrong”. Have you noticed how separated Left & Right media sources have become? Consciously done or not, such insularity is a symptom of political polarization.

Nothing organic happens in the headlines anymore. Anything not politically useful goes down the memory hole. End result? Once you start valuing people for who they are instead of their political utility, you quickly find yourself alone and outside a System that constantly demands loyalty but never offers it.

Ask Viktor Suvorov.

That is not to say you should befriend a political animal. That’s just pearls to swine, until they recover. It is to say that people are who ultimately matter, not political systems, and that Christ is the State’s natural enemy. We worship the only God (real or fake) who offers us HIS loyalty! Steal THAT secret, ye intelligence services!