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

limitations and extremely finite assets, so why would we waste those assets chasing down each and
every potential threat? That goes to the second myth of what an intelligence organization really
does. We can’t just spread ourselves thin looking for, and hoping to stumble on, new and possible
dangers. Instead, we’ve always had to identify and focus on those that are already clear and
present. If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can’t be worrying about the
Arab down the block. If suddenly it’s the Arab in your backyard, you can’t be worrying about the
People’s Republic of China, and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction
notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you’re going to do is look
over his shoulder for a walking corpse.
But didn’t the plague originate in China?
It did, as well as did one of the greatest single Maskirovkas in the history of modern espionage.
I’m sorry?
It was deception, a fake out. The PRC knew they were already our number-one surveillance target.
They knew they could never hide the existence of their nationwide “Health and Safety” sweeps.
They realized that the best way to mask what they were doing was to hide it in plain sight. Instead
of lying about the sweeps themselves, they just lied about what they were sweeping for.
The dissident crackdown?
Bigger, 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 and all of it was
to divert the world’s eye from the real danger growing within China. And it worked! Every shred of
intel we had on the PRC, the sudden disappearances, the mass executions, the curfews, the reserve
call-ups—everything could easily be explained as standard ChiCom procedure. In fact, it worked so
well, we were so convinced that World War III was about to break out in the Taiwan Strait, that we
diverted other intel assets from countries where undead outbreaks were just starting to unfold.
The Chinese were that good.
And we were that bad. It wasn’t the Agency’s finest hour. We were still reeling from 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.” The last brushfire war was a debacle and
guess who took the fall. We’d been ordered to justify a political agenda, then when that agenda
became a political liability, those who’d originally given the order now stood back with the crowd
and pointed the finger at us. “Who told us we should go to war in the first place? Who mixed us up
in all this mess? The CIA!” We couldn’t defend ourselves without violating national security. We had
to just sit there and take it. And what was the result? Brain drain. Why stick around and be the