World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA, USA
[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.]
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. This myth is the by-product
of an organization, which, by its very nature, must exist and operate in secrecy. Secrecy is a
vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation. “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. Hey, be careful looking at that website, you know who keeps a record of every website
anyone’s ever looked at ever, 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, so whenever anything, anywhere occurred without any warning,
where do you think the finger was pointed: “Hey, how did that crazy country get those nukes?
Where was the CIA? How come all those people were murdered by that fanatic? Where was the
CIA? How come, when the dead began coming back to life, we didn’t know about it until they were
breaking through our living room windows? Where the hell was the goddamn CIA!?!”
The truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other official and unofficial
U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, global
illuminati. For starters, we never had that kind of funding. Even during the blank check days of the
cold war, it’s just not physically possible to have eyes and ears in every back room, cave, alley,
brothel, bunker, office, home, car, and rice paddy across the entire planet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m
not saying we were impotent, and maybe we can take credit for some of the things our fans, and
our critics, have suspected us of over the years. But if you add up all the crackpot conspiracy
theories from Pearl Harbor 1 to the day before the Great Panic, then you’d have an organization
not only more powerful than the United States, but the united efforts of the entire human race.
We’re not some shadow superpower with ancient secrets and alien technology. We have very real